Waiting
by bluestargem
Summary: Neville waits. Because that is the only thing he can do. Post-DH oneshot, written for ladyoftheknightley's School Subjects Competition (Divination category).


**Waiting**

The St Mungo's waiting room has a basket of wool and knitting needles in a corner, with a crumpled sign stuck on the side stating "Only straight knitting please. Knitted squares to be 25cm x 25cm." No one knows what it's there for, or why it's there, and many of the knitted squares are already past 25cm x 25cm, with needles stuck haphazardly in a mass of tangled wool. But everyone in the room still seems to have a ball of wool and a half-knitted square in their hands, as if attempting to while away the time until they could see the friends or relatives that were currently patients in the hospital. Knitting their never-ending squares as they wait for good news or bad news. Or merely just waiting.

They come here every week, his grandmother and him, and it has become a tradition to sit in this crowded room and take up a ball of wool, just like the rest, and begin their knitting. They come here so frequently now that it is like taking up from the place they stopped last time, and merely continuing the pattern of winding the wool around the needle, slipping it out, pulling it tight. The wait is always long, and they are always silent. There is nothing to say when they come here. There is nothing to do either. Except to knit, and to wait.

After an hour or so, they are called into the room to see his mother. Today, as always, she is in her wheelchair, looking very frail under a pile of blankets in her lap. Again, she is by the window, looking out with a faraway expression in those faded eyes. That expression does not change when she turns to see them, as they come towards her and sit in the visitor chairs and greet her in the quiet voices that Healers always use for patients.

"Hi Mum," he says.

"Hi Alice," his grandmother says.

She says nothing. She does not recognise them.

She glances at them, her eyes taking on a curious, child-like expression, and then bows her head to her lap. On the pile of blankets, her wrinkled hands play with a pair of knitting needles where an unravelling scarf is looped on it.

"How's your day been?" his grandmother asks. There is nothing but useless, inane questions to ask now, and even these are left unanswered, somehow blocked by the invisible barrier that has separated her from them. His mother merely turns her head uncomprehendingly and picks up her knitting.

"I've almost finished," she says instead, and her cracked voice, which had once at least been youthful and light, is now cracked and distant. She holds up the scarf which is more of a mess of undone stitches than of an actual knitted scarf. Her face lights up with a simple glow of excitement.

"Really?" Grandmother asks in a falsely cheery voice, but she can't quite make it. Her voice breaks as she turns away to hide her face. Neville merely stays unmoving in his chair. The Healers have said that she won't live past the end of the month, and will soon fade away, like his father.

Finally, he stirs.

"Mum," he asks. "Do you remember us?"

She stays quiet for a while, picking at the stitches of her scarf, unravelling them, straightening out the wool, her fingers gradually growing faster and more frantic in her movements.

"I don't know you," she says at last, frightened. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know!" She claps her hands to her ears in a petulant childish gesture and screams out the last few words, shaking her head, stamping her feet, until the Healers come in and tell them the visit is over now and they must go. And so they do, relenting, perhaps even willingly, because it always ends this way. Every week they ask her now. Every week she does not recognise them – _him –_ does not realise that the man in front of her is her son, does not know that her son is seeking that first, and perhaps last, acknowledgement that she is his mother.

They have not belonged in her world for a long time. And Neville fears that she may not return until it is too late.

So every week he takes up his needles in the crowded waiting room, and he continues the pattern – of knitting, of waiting – until perhaps one day she will come back to their world again.

And call him son.


End file.
